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Speeches
Marketing
Partner Forum 2009, Taking Your Program into the
21st Century: Lessons from Top Marketers at Non-Legal
Professional Service Firms -- Moderator: Suzanne
Lowe, Jan 29, 2009
ACEC’s
2009 Annual Convention and Legislative Summit,
The Integration Imperative: Erasing Marketing
and Business Development Silos—Once and
For All—In Professional Service Firms. April
27, 2008
News
SMPS
Connections featured this newsletter as a
"Tool of the Week," September 2008
 The
View from the Other Side: B2B Marketing Practices
from Other Industries, ITSMA, June 2008.
Adapting
to a Downturn, Suzanne Lowe and Ford Harding,
The Council of Public Relations Firms. May 2008.
Read
a summary of Suzanne Lowe's upcoming book The
Integration Imperative™.
New
from the Expertise Marketplace™ Blog
The
Accountability Conundrum
Thought
Leadership: the light at the end of the tunnel?
STILL
the only verified link between marketing measurement
and effectiveness
See
all the posts at the Expertise Marketplace blog
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Recent
Issues
Expectations
for Marketing Experts - Thought Leadership,
November 2008
Expectations
for Marketing Experts - Geting Closer to Clients,
October 2008
Expectations
for Marketing Experts - Roles, ROI and Influence,
September 2008
You
can order
Marketplace Masters from Barnes &
Noble, Amazon, your favorite online bookseller,
or CEO-READ.
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The
Marketplace Master™ is a monthly email publication
on professional service marketing from Expertise Marketing,
LLC.
About
this month's issue
Is
anyone not thinking about improving marketing
ROI these days? Given the current climate and the cutbacks
in many firms, it’s more important than ever to
make sure you have the right people assigned to your
projects. And, it’s crucial to make sure their
talents are being put to good use – they’ve
got to focus on the end goals, even if the team members
are from different outside vendors.
So
this month I continue my series of articles on expectations
for marketing experts with a discussion of assigning
and managing resources -- another competency marketers
should master. There are, of course, dozens more I haven’t
mentioned. What are your thoughts on what makes a person
a true marketing expert?
Suzanne Lowe
President, Expertise Marketing
Author, Marketplace Masters: How Professional Service
Firms Compete to Win
Expectations
for Marketing Experts - Assigning and Managing Resources
So
far in this series of articles I’ve written about
several areas marketers must master before they can
be considered marketing experts. September’s topic
was understanding
roles (and not limiting them to marketing communications).
October’s article was on getting
closer to clients. Last month I discussed thought
leadership.
This
month I have one more competency that true marketing
experts need to master: the ability to assign and manage
disparate resources for a project (and even more important,
multiple projects!).
Managing
the Motley Crew
There
comes a time in every marketing expert’s career
when it’s necessary to assign resources, sometimes
independent of each other, to work more effectively
together than they might have separately in the past.
Any
seasoned professional service marketer knows the pitfalls
of hiring outside assistance, knowing their limitations.
Marketers are judged on the performance of these outside
sources, and rightfully so. But what does one do when
the outside resources themselves have limited competence,
scope of services, or the special cutting-edge talents
that a professional firm requires?
A
Whole Larger than the Sum of its Parts
Let’s
look at a case where a savvy chief marketing officer
must cobble together an outside team to provide the
most needed services. Take the example of two critical
public relations functions: first, placing well-planned
stories about your firm or its work. This function requires
a seasoned and well-connected PR resource who can tap
a deep network to ensure that the media features your
firm in extraordinarily valuable ways.
Second,
maximizing opportunities for being a quoted source when
a sudden news situation arises. For this function, your
firm needs an astute and time-oriented PR pro who thinks
it's a thrill to comb the daily media outlets for breaking
news, in order to present your firm's experts as quotable
experts.
This
is a classic case of two separate resources that have
created powerful niche orientations in the public relations
service set. But what if an outside resource doesn't
feature them both? Enter the seasoned marketing expert,
whose job it is to bring these resources together, even
if they don't know each other, and even if they may
be working for separate public relations companies.
The
same situation occurs in promoting a significant piece
of thought leadership, like a book or research report.
A marketing expert should be facile with finding, assigning,
managing and evaluating a host of inside and outside
resources, including an agent, editor, publishing company,
traditional PR person, online PR resource, web marketer,
newsletter creator, and blog creator. In each case,
the whole is indeed more valuable than the parts. It
takes a marketing expert to creatively solve the problem.
Increasingly,
professional services executives will expect their marketing
leaders to possess this skill.
What
are your thoughts on hiring and managing outside resources
from different firms to work on the same project? Has
it worked for you? Has it bombed? What lessons can you
learn on your way to becoming a marketing expert?
Many
Thanks
As
I wrap things up for 2008 I’d like to thank those
who helped make the past 12 issues of The Marketplace
Master™ happen. Thanks to my interview subjects:
My
guest columnist for August was Ford Harding –
many thanks for the article Cross
Markets Aren't So Different.
And
thank you to the hundreds of professional service firm
executives and marketers who took my 2008 Integration
Imperative surveys. Your input made a valuable contribution
to my
upcoming book.
Your
feedback is important to us. Please contact
us with your comments and questions.
Take
the confidential, web-based Marketplace Masters professional
service firm differentiation assessment test for
instant feedback on whether your firm is doing differentiation
right.
©
2008 Expertise
Marketing, LLC All Rights Reserved
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